Family Values: Alec Baldwin Stars in Orphans on Broadway

Alec Baldwin may have recently lost what he calls “perhaps the greatest gig that I’ve ever had”—that would be playing Jack Donaghy, the preening, ruthless, but bighearted father figure to a dysfunctional crew of comedy writers and performers on the late, lamented 30 Rock—but that doesn’t mean that he’s given up the role of paterfamilias. A few weeks after the show’s final episode, the 55-year-old actor and his wife announced that they were expecting their first child, and now Baldwin is returning to the New York stage for the first time since 2006 as a mysterious gangster on the lam who takes two semiferal young men under his wing in the Broadway revival of Lyle Kessler’s psychological thriller Orphans. “There’s a good amount of poetry and fairy tale in this play,” Baldwin says. “If it’s done right, it has a wonderful mix of beauty and truth and violence and weirdness.”

Orphans premiered to strong reviews in Los Angeles in 1983, but it was the 1985 Steppenwolf Theatre production in Chicago (and later New York), directed by Gary Sinise with the company’s trademark rock-’em-sock-’em ferocity, that turned it into a cult classic. A three-hander exploding with savage emotion, it takes place entirely in the seedy North Philadelphia home shared by the siblings of the title: Treat (Ben Foster), a hoodlum who supports them by sticking up people at knifepoint, and Phillip (Tom Sturridge), who, convinced by his brother that it’s unsafe to leave the house, has remained inside for a decade or so, living on tuna sandwiches and television. One night, Treat returns home with a drunken, middle-aged stranger named Harold (Baldwin), whom he ties up and plans to rob. But Harold, himself an orphan since childhood, turns the tables and, after pistol-whipping Treat, moves in with the boys, becoming a kind of father to them while hiding out from some Chicago mobsters who want to kill him.

A stepchild of Pinter and Shepard, Kessler is a playwright whose appeal has always been more visceral than intellectual. As the sterling director of this Orphans, Daniel Sullivan, points out, this is key to capturing the work’s lightning-in-a-bottle energy. “At some point in the rehearsal process, the play has its own propulsive drive and wayward life that you have to accommodate,” he says. “If you literalize it, the mystery goes away.”

It’s no mystery why Sullivan thought that Baldwin, with his knack for embodying ambivalence, not to mention his old-school masculinity, comic élan, and simmering aura of menace, would be such a perfect fit for Harold. Sullivan also knew after one audition that the 27-year-old Sturridge, an exciting talent who has made a name for himself on the London stage, most recently in Polly Stenham’s No Quarter, would bring something unexpected and dangerous to a character that could easily come off as a one-dimensional wild child. “There has to be something about Phillip that makes him different from anyone else,” Sturridge says. “You have to create a particular kind of person to persuade an audience that you’re a boy who wouldn’t leave the house for ten years. I’m playing a risky game with what I’m doing, but that’s what makes it exciting and alive.”

When the production’s original Treat, Shia LaBeouf, notoriously dropped out after a week of rehearsals (according to Baldwin, the young movie star was taken aback by the hard work involved), he was replaced by Foster, best known for playing a mentally unstable young artist on HBO’s Six Feet Under and an Iraq war hero who falls for a soldier’s widow opposite Samantha Morton in The Messenger. “Kessler is a brutal poet,” Foster, 32, says. “He pursues a line of questioning—How do we make our families? What is it like to be abandoned? What does it mean to be a brother or a father?—that’s impossible to ignore.”

Baldwin says that digging into the play has made him reflect on his own parents and brothers, as well as on his imminent fatherhood. (“I want to make it very different from my first experience, in terms of being there and not missing anything,” he says. “If, as a result, acting ends for me, I couldn’t care less.”) He also says that he recognized aspects of himself in the other characters. “I look at Phillip, who spends his days looking out the window, and I think about how I know what it means to be lonely,” he says. “And I look at Treat, with his roiling volatility, and I remember what it’s like to be so frustrated because you want to change the circumstances of your life, but you can’t. I have moments in this play when I get pretty choked up. It’s very affecting.”

For Baldwin, one moment that best captures the essence of the character he’s playing comes early in act one. Having escaped from being bound and gagged, he confronts Treat, who is threatening him with a knife, calmly explaining that he’s a wild animal who needs to be tamed and then knocking him unconscious with the butt of a pistol. “There’s no meanness or anger involved—it’s my job, like changing a lightbulb,” Baldwin says. “Then I turn to his brother and say, ‘That’s lesson number one, Phillip: Never lose control.’ ”